1903 OXNARD BEET STRIKE

On February 11, 1903, 500 Japanese and 200 Mexican sugar beet wolkers united their two unions to form the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association or the JMLA to protest the broken promises of the Western Agricultural Contracting Corporation (WACC), the major labor contractor supplying laborers to the sugar beet growers. Workers under WACC received lower wages, were forced to pay double commissions and patronize the company store. Members of the JMLA elected Kozaburo Baba as president of the Association, which was the first important agricultural workers' union made up of different racial minority workers. The workers reached an agreement and broke the monopoly of the WACC.

However, when the JMLA's secretary, J.M. Lizarraras, applied to join the American Federation of Labor as the sugar beet and Farm Labor's Union of Oxnard, he was told by AFof L President Samuel Gompers that "your union...will under no circumstance accept membership of any Chinese or Japanese'" The Mexican members of the union met and directed Lizarraras to respond as follows:

"In the past, we have counciled, fought and lived on very short rations with our Japanese brothers, and toiled with them in the fields, and they have been uniformly kind and considerate. We would be false to them and to ourselves and to the cause of Unionism if we, now, accepted privileges for ourselves which are not accorded to them. We are going to stand by men who stood by us in the long, hard fight which ended in a victory over the enemy. We will refuse any other kind of charter, except one which will wipe out race prejudices and recognize our fellow workers as being as good as ourselves."

If not for this racist policy of the AFof L, workers of different ethnic backgrounds would have organized as one union as early as 1903. Instead, they would have to wait for Filipino and Mexican workers to come together in the 1960s to organize the United Farm Workers (UFW).